THE WILD BUNCH

"We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us.  Perhaps the worst most of all"--The Wild Bunch

Saturday night I saw The Winding Stream at the Bloor.  It's a documentary about the Carter Family and their legacy.  At the end they showed a flash mob in Portland, Oregon singing "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" Real classic music.

Mathew cancelled the Meetup this weekend where we were going to do some more colouring.  Pity!

The Carlton cinema is showing westerns on Wednesdays this month. (Missed The Good, the Bad & the Ugly last week.) This week I saw Sam Peckinpah's brutal classic The Wild Bunch for at least the fourth time.  It just gets better and better!

The graphic violence feels honest rather than exploitative.  Peckinpah has a particularly unsentimental attitude toward children, who are seen torturing scorpions at the start of the movie.  The scene where the Mexicans lose control of the machine gun may strike some people as racist:  a modern weapon in primitive hands.  And his view of women is hardly P.C.:  they tend to be whores.

Aging actors like William Holden and Robert Ryan are at their considerable best here as aging outlaws. (Ryan plays a particularly sympathetic character, despite being the gang's turncoat, and achieves redemption in the end.) Lucien Ballard's cinematography is masterful, especially the scene where the bridge blows up and the horses and riders fall into the river.